Birds and Dinosaurs: Their Strangest Feature

A nifty bit of respiratory design goes back a very long way

It took an awful lot of clever adaptations to the produce common bird. It’s got to be light, so you give it hollow  bones. It’s got to be strong, so you give it less a breastbone than a keel, to which powerful wing muscles can be attached. And it’s got to have a prodigious respiratory system—flying ain’t easy—so you give it a peculiar system of multiple air sacs serve as lungs, with the air rushing through in one direction, making a tour of each of the chambers and then exiting, rather than rushing in and out, as in our lungs.

Now, a new study in Nature suggests that something else is at work in those lungs: avian respiratory architecture may be a feature left over from the long-ago days when birds were dinosaurs. That conclusion was announced by a group of scientists from the University of Utah, who did their work not by studying birds, but their distant cousins, monitor lizards. Earlier evidence had already shown that alligators have a four-chambered respiratory system, so it was no news that monitor lizards do too. But the researchers were less interested in what the architecture of the animals’ lungs is than in how the whole system works.

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When Dinosaurs Came in Color

Scientists already knew that birds are descended from the dinosaurs. Now new research says that feathered dinosaurs also had surprisingly colorful plumage

It’s probably hard to believe, but there was a time, not that long ago, when scientists thought dinosaurs were extinct. No, seriously! That was before paleontologists began to understand the impressive anatomical similarities between fossil dinos and living birds. The icing on the cake: a series of discoveries, starting in the 1990s, showing that some dinosaurs even sported feathers. It’s no longer even slightly controversial to claim that birds are descended from dinosaurs, and even that they are dinosaurs—the only branch of the family that survived a massive comet strike 65 million years ago.

With that relationship firmly established, scientists have moved on to looking at some more finely grained questions, and a new paper in Nature is casting light on one of them: since the feathers of modern birds are often intensely colorful, how much color did their extinct cousins display? The answer, it turns out, is probably a lot. Feathers, says Julia Clarke, of the University of Texas, Austin, one of the paper’s co-authors, were brightly colored from the time they first appeared in Maniraptoran dinosaurs, including oviraptors and dromaeosaurs.

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Solar Chimneys Can Convert Hot Air to Energy

A test solar updraft tower in Manzanares, Spain, ran successfully for several years in the 1980s before toppling in a windstorm.  PHOTOGRAPH BY SCHLAICH BERGERMANN SOLAR 

Chile's Atacama Desert is as eerily beautiful as it is barren, hot, and dry. Yet this seemingly inhospitable patch of Earth might be the perfect host for a different kind of solar energy, one that has nothing to do with photovoltaic panels.

Solar updraft technology is attracting interest in desert regions worldwide in Chile, the Southwest United States, Australia, China, and the Middle East. Fueled by hot air, rather than direct sunlight, solar chimneys present a compelling prospect for producing clean, renewable energy. They also offer significant advantages over conventional photovoltaic (PV) panels—but at the moment, they face even more significant financing hurdles. 


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Inside China's Energy Machine

Paper Bound for Recycling

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Outside a paper mill in Boxing, Shandong Province, stacks of bailed waste paper are stockpiled for recycling. A nearby biomass cogeneration plant supplies energy for the facility.

Also known as combined heat and power or CHP, cogeneration involves producing electricity and heat from a single fuel source—in this case, mostly agricultural waste from cotton fields.

China has international support for this type of project. In June 2011, the World Bank approved a $150 million loan to China to improve energy efficiency in Shandong. In particular, the loan is meant to go toward greater use of biomass for power and heat generation and energy-efficiency leasing arrangements.

Ancient Feathers in Amber: Modern Equivalent

An isolated barb from a white belly feather of a modern grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis), illustrating coiled barbule bases comparable to those in the Cretaceous specimen. In both cases, the coiling is a structural adaptation that allows the feather to absorb water. 

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Green Energy Trends: Transportation starting to go electric

To those sick of the hype over electric vehicles such as the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf, shown here, Ron Pernick, co-founder and managing director of Clean Edge says ... get over it. The buzz over electrified transportation is only going to get stronger, he says, with a build-out of high-speed rail networks and a resurgence of streetcars joining the mix.

Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley hopes to see a shift in behavior from personal cars to use of more mass transit, but isn't ready to call it a trend. "There are options there," he says, "but they are not real yet."

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New Computer Model Uses DNA to Identify Earth’s Most Distinctive Birds

Oilbird, the world's most evolutionarily distinct bird. Image: Walter Jetz

Of all the birds on Earth, perhaps none is more unique than the South American oilbird, which 90 million years ago hopped onto its own branch of the evolutionary tree and has been on it ever since.

The oilbird perches atop a new analysis of avian distinctiveness: how old each species is, and whether they have close relatives.

By this metric, the most distinct species are truly one-of-a-kind. “It’s millions of years of evolutionary information that’s distinct to the species,” said evolutionary biologist Walter Jetz of Yale University.

The new analysis, led by Jetz and published April 10 in Current Biology, used a computer model that turned genetic data, the fossil record and previously-proposed taxonomic trees into a new evolutionary tree of birds.

Just because a species isn’t distinct, of course, doesn’t mean it’s not special: If yellow warblers vanished, for example, North America would be a far less cheerful place. But at least there are other other warblers. If the giant ibis or California condor goes extinct, though, there’s nothing else remotely like it.

“Those millions of years of evolutionary history would be lost,” said Jetz.

Hoatzin, the 3rd most evolutionarily-distinct species. Kate/Flickr

Jetz emphasized that distinctiveness isn’t just a matter of coloration, anatomy, and other aesthetics. It’s also reflected in habits and behaviors and life histories, perhaps even in cognitive abilities and molecules. After 80 million years of evolution, oilbirds probably make some pretty interesting proteins.

Some evolutionarily distinctive birds, including ostrich and osprey, are relatively common. Others, however, such as Christmas Island frigatebirds and the great ibis, are imperiled. We have a special obligation to protect these species, says Jetz.

His team is trying to use these data to come up with a conservation strategy, identifying key habitats where with relatively little effort, humans could save 60 percent of this evolutionary distinctiveness. They’ve also developed a website where you can look at the distinctiveness of birds in your own area.

Evolutionarily distinct birds often don’t occur in biodiversity hotspots, said Jetz, and aren’t appreciated as exceptional by birdwatchers and nature-lovers. He hopes that will change.

“Just looking at an oilbird, I feel like I’ve gone back 60 million years. You say to yourself, ‘You’re a bird from a different time!,’” said Jetz. “I wish that as many people as possible, as many future generations, get to experience this, too


Reposted From Wired

Deadly Dinosaur Chase Reconstructed

A set of prehistoric footprints, said to show meat-eating dinosaurs hunting vegetarian dinos, has just been recreated in a detailed 3-D model.

The frozen-in-time event, dated to at least 112 million years ago, happened at what is now the Paluxy River site in Dinosaur Valley State Park near the town of Glen Rose, Texas — just southwest of Fort Worth.

The chase involved 20 to 30-foot-long predatory dinosaurs going after 30 to 50-foot-long dinosaur prey. While paleontologists aren’t yet certain of the species, Acrocanthosaurus (aka “High-spined Lizard”) is considered the likely hunter and Pleurocoelus (a hefty and impressively huge plant eater) the hunted.

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Dinosaur True Colors Revealed for First Time

"Dino fuzz" pigment discovery in feathers may strengthen dinosaur-bird link.

Sinosauropteryx is the first fossil dinosaur to have its color scientifically established.

Illustration courtesy James Robins

Chris Sloan


Pigments have been found in fossil dinosaurs for the first time, a new study says.

The discovery may prove once and for all that dinosaurs' hairlike filaments—sometimes called dino fuzz—are related to bird feathers, paleontologists announced today.

The finding may also open up a new world of prehistoric color, illuminating the role of color in dinosaur behavior and allowing the first accurately colored dinosaur re-creations, according to the study team, led by Fucheng Zhang of China's Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology.

The team identified fossilized melanosomes—pigment-bearing organelles—in the feathers and filament-like "protofeathers" of fossil birds and dinosaurs from northeastern China.

Found in the feathers of living birds, the nano-size packets of pigment—a hundred melanosomes can fit across a human hair—were first reported in fossil bird feathers in 2008.


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Inside China's Energy Machine

 A Turbine-Tip View

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

From the top of a nacelle in Jilin Province, a landscape ripe for wind power stretches into the distance. (A nacelle contains the control electronics, gearbox, and drive train in a wind turbine.)

Thanks to development here and elsewhere, China's wind market doubled every year between 2006 and 2009, overtaking the United States as the country with the most installed wind energy capacity in 2010.

An example of how the Chinese industry has been working to expand its global footprint is Xinjiang Goldwind Science and Technology, which manufactured the turbines shown here at the Qian'an I Wind Farms. In September 2011, Goldwind signed a deal to build a wind farm in Illinois, at an estimated cost of $200 million, and this month the company has secured more than $5.5 billion in loans and guarantees for domestic and overseas expansion.

But there has been push-back. The U.S. International Trade Commission voted just last week to investigate charges from U.S. wind equipment manufacturers that they are being unfairly harmed by cheap government-subsidized imports from China and Vietnam.

With similar charges also launched by some U.S. solar manufacturers, renewable energy eventually could spur a trade war between the United States and its largest source of imported goods, China.

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Dinosaur Feathers Preserved in Amber: Curly Coils

The cork-screw shaped structures in the image are the tightly coiled bases of feather barbules.

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Green Energy Trends: Energy development in the developing world

"Few research labs innovate for other people; they innovate to meet their own needs," says Daniel Kammen Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a climate advisor to the Obama administration, explaining the importance of energy development and innovation that is evolving in the developing world. Shown here are solar panels on a gas station in Algeria, for example.

In Central America, plans are under way for a power grid that connects together everyone from Panama to Mexico. While the grid will be powered by all kinds of energy, solar and wind will be part of the mix. "We need more developing countries prioritizing their own needs, not just waiting for whatever happens to spill over [to them]," says Kammen.

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One-Ton Feathered Dinosaur Found: Fluffy and Fierce

Yutyrannus hints that T. rex, too, may have been downy soft.

A newly discovered giant feathered dinosaur—a distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex—sported a fine down coat, making it the largest feathered animal known to have lived, scientists say.

Paleontologists already knew that some members of the group of dinosaurs to which T. rex belonged, called theropods, were feathered. But most of the known feathered dinos were relatively small.

The new dinosaur species, has been named Yutyrannus huali—a Latin-Mandarin mash-up that means "beautiful feathered tyrant."

The skull of Yutyrannus. Photo by Zang Hailong.

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